Sci-fi 'Demons' are in the details of anti-matter

— -- An anti-matter bomb powers the plot of Angels & Demons, but scientists say that's the only place you'll see such a weapon.

"We're working on understanding the mysteries of the universe here. We're not interested in weapons," says anti-matter expert Rolf Landua of CERN, the European physics lab on the Swiss-French border.

Landua was the physics adviser for the Ron Howard-directed movie based on the 2000 book by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. And CERN is the lab in which scientists actually are producing minute amounts of anti-matter.

Even if those scientists crossed over to the dark side and decided to make a bomb, "it would take billions of years to accumulate enough anti-matter for an explosion," says Landua, who led a 10-year experiment that trapped a billionth of a gram's worth of antimatter hydrogen atoms.

"We're taking a leap," Howard concedes.

In the new movie, an explosive gram of anti-matter made at a lab becomes the object of contention between Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks), the Vatican and secret-society bad guys bent on blowing things sky-high.

What exactly is anti-matter?

Anti-matter particles are mirror images of the everyday matter particles found inside atoms; for the proton, an anti-proton exists, and for the electron, an anti-electron. Theoretically, equal amounts of anti-matter should have been made in the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. Matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, so why matter — the stuff of stars, planets and people — dominates the universe is one of the mysteries of cosmology.

In real life, anti-matter is found only in lab experiments and when cosmic rays smack into the atmosphere, spitting out brief-lived physics exotica every once in a rare while. At CERN, high-energy beams of proton particles are fired into metal blocks to produce an anti-matter particle in about one of every million collisions. Elaborate magnetic trapping schemes capture these rarities in a vacuum to prevent their contact with real matter.

The premise of Angels & Demons is that a CERN physicist has figured out how to make and store these anti-matter particles in massive quantities. The pursuit of a canister filled with this explosive anti-matter forms the heart of the film.

After making that leap, the filmmakers went to great lengths to design the magnetic thermos bottle that traps the movie's anti-matter bomb. "If we ever collected that much anti-matter, we'd probably store it in something that looks a lot like the movie's canister," Landua says.

"Audiences are getting smarter by the minute, so I think it's just playing fair," Howard says. "I would like someone to see this and say, yes, it's science fiction, but it's smart science fiction."

Fans of science without the fiction, of course, wonder whether such authenticity is a good idea.

"There's a tension between realism and a science adviser making crazy things look real," asks Chris Mooney, co-author (with scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum) of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, scheduled for July publication. "You can take a crazy premise and make it seem to a person watching in the theater, 'Wow, this is really real.' "

Mooney, whose The Intersection blog (blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection) tackles questions of how society views science, worries that entertainers are co-opting scientists to sell movie tickets while misinforming the public about how the universe really works. "What is the meaning of 'accuracy' in the context of so fantastical a story?" he asks.

CERN's role in the story line

Still, Mooney says, what's most important is how the portrayal of scientists, as good or evil, will shape how the film affects views of CERN and physics. Noting that Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, who plays the scientist sidekick in the film, is perhaps better looking than the typical physicist, he adds, "Could be worse. On a list of science stinkers, this doesn't sound like the highest one out there."

For its part, CERN embraced the wacky science fiction of Angels & Demons when it was first published, carefully explaining on its website that it lacks a fleet of private jets or antimatter bombs.

The movie's physicist character, Vittoria Vetra, played by Zurer, is modeled on Landua (very loosely).

"It's entertainment, but we're all tantalized," Landua says. "A lot of physicists will be pleased to see the lab in the movie."